Phil Robson: Breaking the Stigma Behind Math
By Kleshie Manyo-Plange ‘28
“I’m not a math person” is an easy label to give yourself. At Milton, where students are surrounded by classmates who appear to be effortlessly good at everything, that feeling can be even harder to escape. Mr. Phil Robson, a math teacher who has taught at Milton since 2018, believes that attitude is worth questioning. “You can be really good at math and still feel like you’re the worst person in the room at math,” Mr. Robson said. “Because you’re comparing your weakness to somebody else’s strengths.”
The question of why math has become a subject people are so willing to distance themselves from is at the crux of Mr. Robson’s recently published book, Math is for Everyone: The Place, Usefulness, and Joy of Math in Our Everyday Lives.
In fact, Mr. Robson has wanted to write a book since he was 17. He joked that “young people do math and old people write books,” but the idea stayed with him for years. The book finally began to take shape after a conversation in May of 2024 with history teacher Mr. Matthew Blanton. The conversation made Mr. Robson think more seriously about the way people talk about the subject. “Math is always bashed,” he said. One of the biggest problems, he argued, is that people are more comfortable admitting they cannot do math than admitting they cannot read. “No one in their thirties is going to say, ‘Oh yeah, I could never read at school,’” he shared.
His book tries to push against that idea. Rather than treating math as something reserved for people who are naturally good at it, Mr. Robson looks at math as something people can explore and play with, a subject open to anyone interested in it. The book is divided into three sections: Debunking, Demystifying, and Playing. Some chapters challenge common assumptions about math, while others explain why students learn certain concepts in school and connect math to things outside the classroom.
One of the chapters in his book grew out of a conversation about Sonic the Hedgehog. Mr. Robson became interested in how video games allow players to fail, try again, and gradually improve without treating every mistake as a total disaster. He connects that idea to learning math, where students can sometimes become focused on getting the right answer rather than figuring out how to think through a problem.
Mr. Robson also questioned the idea that the math students learn in school is only useful if they eventually use those exact skills as adults. He believes the value of math extends beyond just the classroom setting. “Math is not just a tool,” Mr. Robson said. “We think, we play with ideas, we think in the abstract.” To him, that broader definition of math is particularly important when placed at Milton. He said that although Milton students are intellectually strong, they can become divided into categories: the STEM person, the English person, the athlete, and so on. Those labels can make students decide too early on what they are or are not capable of. Mr. Robson believes that Milton students can easily fall into what he sees as the bad mindset when they decide that they simply are not “math people.”
The idea that people are more than just the labels attached to them is crucial even beyond the classroom. For Mr. Robson, going beyond the labels means seeing math as more than a measure of what you are “good” or “bad” at. Instead, he views math as a way of thinking and of understanding the world around us.
Source: Amazon